Philip Kerr - Prussian Blue

“I can’t say,” said Bormann. “Because sometimes words aren’t enough and sometimes they’re too much. But since a picture is worth a thousand words, there is this.” And after a long pause he opened his desk drawer, pulled out a manila file, and handed it to me.

“What’s that?” asked Gerdy.

“It’s a copy of a report from the Munich police,” said Bormann. “The original is in the same safety-deposit box as those letters about my brother. The report concerns the murder of a Jew that took place at Stadelheim Prison in July 1919, following the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic. The Jew’s name was Gustav Landauer, and apart from his left-wing politics and the historical event that brought about his death, he is perhaps best known for his translations of Shakespeare into German. Let me add also that I don’t personally question the killing of this man, merely the wisdom of the photograph that was taken of it and which the report includes. Landauer was a communist agitator and a dedicated Bolshevik who would have had no compunction in murdering his own right-wing enemies. As I said, these were extremely violent times. My aim here is merely to point out the complete futility of making any noises at the Berghof concerning who’s a murderer and who isn’t.”

As I moved to open the file, Albert Bormann laid his hand firmly on mine and added, “It’s not pretty, Commissar: the man was kicked and stamped to death. However—”

“I’ve seen worse, I can assure you.”

“In your line of work, I’m quite sure you have, Commissar. But I was about to add that, in life, sometimes it’s best not to know what we know. Don’t you agree? Gerdy? Certainly it’s not the sort of thing that the electorate would ever be allowed to see, for obvious reasons. Which is why this particular photograph has been so carefully suppressed.”

“Now I really am intrigued,” said Gerdy.

“Gerdy. Please take a moment to think about this very carefully. Once you’ve seen what’s in that file, I promise you won’t ever be able to forget it. Neither of you will.”

But when he took away his hand I opened the file. You can call it a cop’s curiosity if you like, or something else. Maybe it was curiosity that made me a cop in the first place, and maybe it’s curiosity that would one day get me killed, but he was right of course — as soon as I saw the contents of the file, I wished, like Pandora, I’d left it closed.

Attached to the typewritten police report were three photographs. Two were autopsy pictures of a bearded man in his forties or fifties. And I had seen worse, much worse. For every cop, the sight of violent death is the carpenter’s plane that shaves away our ordinary human feelings until we’re almost desensitized and close to becoming unfeeling planks of wood. In the third photograph a group of four grinning Freikorps were standing beside the same man’s lifeless body; they looked like a group of big-game hunters on safari, posing proudly with a trophy animal they had bagged. One of the men, who appeared to be the leader, I recognized immediately: he was wearing a short leather coat, a tin hat, and puttees and he had one boot resting on the dead man’s badly contused face. I hadn’t seen a photograph like that before; no one had. And of course I was lost for words, as Albert Bormann had predicted. I heard a distant voice from my own past that seemed to say I told you so. For a moment, a sentence took shape in my buzzing head and I felt my lips start to move like a ventriloquist’s dummy, but all that came out of my gaping mouth were a few syllables of startled surprise and horror as though I’d lost the power of speech. And after what seemed an eternity, I closed the file and handed it back to Bormann before it could contaminate me, and it was probably just as well that what I’d almost said to Martin Bormann’s brother, Albert, and Hitler’s close friend Gerdy Troost was left unsaid forever.

Even after seventeen years I remember that photograph very well, and how it was enough to overshadow the remainder of my time in Berchtesgaden like a glimpse into some devil’s private nightmare. Seeing it made me regret my curiosity and I was more than glad to return to Berlin, as if merely being near the Berghof knowing what I knew about the Leader would cause me trouble. I can’t say that it ever did. Nor that it changed my opinion of Hitler very much. But I could easily understand why it wasn’t the sort of thing any chancellor would have felt comfortable sharing with the German folk, and why Albert Bormann treated it like a great state secret. It’s one thing to murder a man in cold blood; it’s something else to have your picture taken while standing on his face with a big grin on your own. Gerdy Troost chose not to look at the picture after all, on my advice, which I now regret having given her, since she remained loyal to the Leader right up until and well after the end. Given the hell Hitler unleashed upon the world, it might have been better if she’d seen him for what he was: a political criminal. Everyone knows that now, of course; Hitler’s name is a byword for mass murder, but back in 1939 it was still shocking to realize that the head of the government was capable of such barbarous behavior. Until then all I’d heard had been rumors that he’d been in charge of a Freikorps death squad in Munich, but these were nothing more than that: rumors. Bormann’s photograph was the first time I’d seen actual evidence and when you’re a cop, that’s really all that’s supposed to matter.

The last I heard of Frau Troost, she’d been ordered not to work as an architect for ten years and fined five hundred deutschmarks by some Allied denazification board. But I liked Gerdy, even admired her, which, at the time, was probably why I thought it best to talk her out of looking at the picture. I was more thoughtful then. Like the way I made sure that the one thing I did before I left the Bavarian Alps was to seek out Dr. Brandt at his little home in Buchenhohe and let him know I’d guessed it was he who’d cut the brake hoses on Hermann Kaspel’s car, he who’d murdered him, and that I knew all about his crummy little racket in Pervitin and Protargol, not to mention those illegal abortions. He arched a dark eyebrow and smiled thinly as if I’d told him a very vulgar joke, said I was sadly mistaken, and then closed the door in my face like someone who was absolutely certain that I couldn’t touch him. He was right about that, of course. I’d have had a better chance arresting Josef Stalin. But still, I wanted to say my piece and not to let him think he had gotten away with it entirely, for Kaspel’s sake and, I suppose, because I felt it was my duty. No one else was interested — interested, I mean, in the kind of justice to which everyone in a decent society is entitled. I saw Major Peter Högl again, too. He turned up at the hotel in a nice little blue sports car and cheekily offered to drive me to the local railway station — I suppose he just wanted to make sure I actually left Berchtesgaden; I let him drive me, too, just so I could tell him what I thought of him and the whole rotten operation on Hitler’s mountain, and when I finished he told me to disappear, or words to that effect.

Would that I had disappeared, in which case perhaps the war might have worked out differently for me; if Heydrich hadn’t drafted me into the SD from Kripo I might never have gone to France and seen Erich Mielke again, nor saved his life. Not that the comrade-general thought himself in my debt; not anymore, that much was certain. And while I was hopeful that having at last got rid of the tenacious Friedrich Korsch permanently I might escape the now leaderless Stasi hounds Mielke had sent after me, I can’t say I was certain. But I did at least feel a greater sense of confidence that it would be a long time before they caught up with me, especially given that I was back in West Germany. I slipped across the new border soon after leaving the Schlossberg Caves and made my way via Cologne and Dortmund to Paderborn in the British zone, which I’d heard was now Germany’s number one dirty-laundry center for “Old Comrades” seeking new identities. I don’t think the poor Tommies suspected such things as laundries for old Nazis even existed, least of all that one would have operated out of a secondhand bookshop next to the university. And seventy-two hours after arriving there, I was checking into the local Hotel Löffelmann as Christof Ganz, with one hundred and fifty deutschmarks in my pocket, a passport, a railway ticket to Munich, and a new driver’s license. I even managed to knock a few years off my age and instantly became a much more youthful fifty. At this rate I could go back to Paderborn in ten years, get another new identity, and not age at all.